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2016 | An Annual Report for Product Managers

Product never sleeps, and last year was no exception. With links to over 80 of the year's best articles and videos, here's Pivot's Annual Report - strictly for Product Managers.

2016 Product Themes

Anti-Lean

After years of dominance, the limits of Lean Startup as a product development methodology were exposed in 2016. Ted Ladd's research cast doubt on the effectiveness of test/learn/iterate as a route to product/market fit in Harvard Business Review.

The irrepressible Marty Cagan was on great form in 2016. Ever the guru, he wrote a great piece on the difference between Product Strategy and Product Vision. The more product teams you have, he emphasised, the more important it is to have a unifying vision and strategy.

John Cutler was ever-present in 2016, churning out content on Medium at an incredible rate. His analysis of Spotify’s Product Strategy was a great case study on why strategy means placing bets on the future.

Product Value

Products are, in essence, value-delivery vehicles. No one illustrated this more clearly than Greylock’s Jerry Chen with his awesome deck on the Unit of Value. Jerry outlined the extent to which all founders and Product Managers need to understand their own product’s Unit of Value if they want to market and scale it effectively.

Eric Blomquist’s team identified 30 ‘elements of value’ that products provide to consumers and advised all companies to ensure someone is responsible for managing and monitoring value.

Others saw products as a collection of pillars. Each pillar either communicates, demonstrates, delivers or extends the product's Unit of Value. All Product Managers should start by defining that value.

Storytelling in Product

As competition for user mindshare increases, the factors that separate truly great products from the merely good came under scrutiny.

Interest in the user's whole 'story', rather than just the product journey, intensified in 2016 with some claiming that storytelling in product was a critical differentiator.

Companies like AirBnB have been outspoken about their commitment to service excellence, going so far as to storyboard the customer experience, in the same way animation studios, like Disney, have done for decades.

Donna Lichaw can claim much of the credit for pioneering thinking around storytelling in product, thanks to the publication of her book on ‘Storymapping Products People Love’. According to Donna, products have a ‘story arc’, the same way films do.

Jay Haynes brought us Thrv - the first JTBD software for Product Managers - and gave a great talk at Product Tank about how JTBD-thinking underpins high growth products.

Conversational Products

Quartz made a big splash with their iOS app in February, which reimagined news as a conversation. For many, this was the first time they had seen 'bot as product'. Samuel Hulick was quick to publish his teardown which highlighted how well bots enable user onboarding.

Amazon’s Echo, powered by Alexa, was the next product to really make an impact on people’s lives. Alexa was omnipresent in 2016 and many felt it could become the next smartphone in terms of its potential for global adoption.

David Bland, ever the sceptic, was one of the few dissenting voices. His venn diagram brilliantly communicated the question of whether Bots are actually solutions looking for problems, rather than the other way around.

Machine Learning and Intelligent Products

Machine Learning was not a term most of us were familiar with a year ago. But, in 2016, it changed everything.

Sundar Pichai announced that Google was a ‘machine learning first’ company and a clash of the titans ensued between them, Amazon, Facebook and Apple as each embraced the technology.

Psychology in Product

Nir Eyal, was everywhere in 2016. Justifiably well regarded for his 'Hooked model' of product stickiness, Nir helped catalyse a wave of interest in the addictive properties of products like Facebook, Snapchat and WhatsApp.

Interest in the topic even reached mainstream publications like the Economist’s 1873, who highlighted concerns raised by some about the ethics of creating products that are more addictive than crack.

Sachin Rekhi went even further, breaking our behaviour down to its chemical components. Instead of creating addiction and compulsion, Sachin encouraged Product Managers to distil the 'science of happiness' and inject it into our products. Bravo.

The Design Sprint

GV's (aka Google Ventures) Design Sprint is a 5-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. A combination of the Lean Startup method and IDEO’s Human-Centred design process, it got turbo-charged this year by Design Partner Jake Knapp’s book, Sprint.

Both Google's David Weekly and Sachin Rekhi, again, taught us how to ace the Product Manager interview, informed by years of experience.

Hunter Walk also had some great insights from his stellar career as Head of Product at YouTube.

2016 was not such a good year for...

Features

Adding features to your product took a hammering in 2016.

Chargebee’s Sadhana Balaji compared successful Product Managers to world-class chefs like Jiro Ono whose greatness lies in their ability to reject unnecessary features and an ability to say ‘no’.

Sara Abaloufia warned us against ‘feature bloat’ and blessed us with a 4-tier approach to avoiding it.

Mongo DB’s Sam Weaver described the natural urge to add ‘more stuff’ to your product as the ‘feature fallacy’ and advised us to focus instead on soothing ‘user pain’ with each new development.

The Hamburger Menu

Hamburger menus have been ever-present in mobile products for years thanks to their simplicity and universal recognition. But product designers have always hated it, believing it constrains product discoverability and is an inefficient means of navigation.

Facebook lead the revolt, abandoning the hamburger in 2013. In 2016, Spotify did the same and spurred renewed attacks from the UX and design community about the need to abandon it altogether.

Credibility on this subject requires pedigree and few are more qualified than Rich Mironov, who was teaching before most of us were doing. His overview of how to move up to Product Director was suitably well-informed.

That other product veteran, Steve Sinofsky, also had a great year content-wise. MixPanel interviewed him in depth for their eBook on product leadership. His anecdotes from years spent building some of the most popular software products ever (at Microsoft) were as compelling as they were insightful.

”Prioritize. Have strong opinions, weakly held. Plug the gaps. Launch and iterate. Know the user. People > products. Create team culture. Always overcommunicate. Work with people whose strengths and weaknesses complement your own. Take good notes. Your calendar is sacred. There is no such thing as an easy launch; launching good enough > never launching.Have fun, detatch, do not burn out. Always have a 20% project. Follow passions and connect the dots later. Always have a cofounder. Begging forgiveness > asking permission. Embrace the struggle. Take big risks; your failures won’t matter in two years and your successes could change the world.”

This is the 100th issue of Pivot Product Hits.

Quality over quantity is the mantra for 2017. To maintain this, PPH will be moving to a monthly cadence. Reduced frequency will mean less repetition, more variety, and improved depth of analysis.